The game modes are not hard to understand. It's standard cookie cutter capture control with lolMCC timers.

You need to be teaching players how to fit their suits. What skills to upgrade. Most people coming into this game are not going to know the difference between the shield recharger and shield regulator. The very first time I played this game, I explored the market and skill lists for probably about an hour or so before I actually began playing. That's way too long for a lot of people. And i'm sure it's even worse with the introduction of new modules, suits, and weapons.

Give back to the academy the rotation of ambush and skimish variants. It will look more presentable than what you have now. Work on better tutorials for upgrading skills (videos, not walls of text) and simplify the market place.

Would your currents tools allow you to have a lower/upper limit for the BA, as per my suggestion?

The game modes are not hard to understand. It's standard cookie cutter capture control with lolMCC timers.

You need to be teaching players how to fit their suits. What skills to upgrade. Most people coming into this game are not going to know the difference between the shield recharger and shield regulator. The very first time I played this game, I explored the market and skill lists for probably about an hour or so before I actually began playing. That's way too long for a lot of people. And i'm sure it's even worse with the introduction of new modules, suits, and weapons.

Give back to the academy the rotation of ambush and skimish variants. It will look more presentable than what you have now. Work on better tutorials for upgrading skills (videos, not walls of text) and simplify the market place.

I highly disagree. I don't think its CCP job to do that. Hear me out before you spit out your drink. When I first played this game, I was a little overwhelmed. I didn't know exactly what I was looking at or how I wanted to build. I knew I wanted an assault guy but I didn't know how to exactly create that mercenary with the SP system.

So you know what my first thoughts were? Go to the forums and youtube. I did my homework. I read for hours and watched various videos. Also, my corporation extended a hand in helping me get adjusted to NE. I feel the hand holding by CCP is unnecessary. This is New Eden. You either learn how to survive and be swallowed up by it. That's why there are guides out there to help new mercs. It's on the merc to find that acquire that information.

Sorry, you can't both advocate the learning cliff and then tell us that you used 3rd party resources to help you climb it.

I certainly see a role for 3rd party guides in helping players with the decision on the WHAT (how to play better or improve their skill/equipment choices) but not for how to understand the core concepts of HOW. HOW should definitely be handled by the in game client, through tutorials, better UI, etc.

God, this type of mentality is getting old.

Congratulations, you are part of the 1%. People need to stop treating this game as it's own grand universe when this game hasn't even begun to stand up on it's own. Nobody gives a **** if this is New Eden. Sorry to put it bluntly, but look at the player counts for yourself. Nobody cares.

Treat this game as is. It's poorly designed, and if you don't go out of your way and look for second hand information, then you need to HTFU and GTFO of New Eden and find a new game to play (BF4/PS2).

Like I said. Bad game design.

All this experimentation is in service of building a better understanding of how new players actually behave, which we can then lean on in future to build a better overall new player experience. We're very aware of the need to review all aspects of the way we introduce DUST to new players; what we're doing here is just trying to learn what we can with the tools already in place.

If your gonna do a change like this, give new player 1 million sp to start a character. Or perhaps triple SP, (without any cap) until 6 million sp. Make sure to explain to new players that that 3x sp won't be forever, and that 6 million is a good spot to be in. but of course your gonna need more.

Players are averaging 100 WP a game against people in equivalent gear?

Players are averaging 100 WP a game against people in equivalent gear? Ignoring the part where this is so low I can almost guarantee you're wrong (despite whatever your metrics say), what are they supposed to do when they get to the regular queues and everyone has better gear? 25 WP per game? They get one assist and that's it? I don't understand your logic.

Until you get a much better matchmaking system this is all irrelevant anyway.

You should also completely remove the SP cap until players hit like 5 million SP.

You are changing multiple variables at once but basing your decision to reduce graduation requirements on the older setup. I would have changed the academy mode and then checked the WP average for that.

I also vote for opening the opportunity to move out of the academy battles but leaving the option there for some time.

I also suggest giving faster SP accrual during some initial period.

You are changing multiple variables at once but basing your decision to reduce graduation requirements on the older setup. I would have changed the academy mode and then checked the WP average for that.

I also vote for opening the opportunity to move out of the academy battles but leaving the option there for some time.

I also suggest giving faster SP accrual during some initial period.

Yes, we are. For a number of reasons we're running tests on a weekly cadence right now, so we don't really have time to explore the entire possibility space variable-by-variable. Instead we're jumping between reasonably optimized implementations of various different plausible models of new player behavior, to try and establish as quickly as possible which model gets us in the right ballpark. We have a number of likely-looking mountains that we want to do a rough height-check on; once we've established some baselines for those, we'll be in a position to consider doing hill-climbing to find local maxima.

All this experimentation is in service of building a better understanding of how new players actually behave, which we can then lean on in future to build a better overall new player experience. We're very aware of the need to review all aspects of the way we introduce DUST to new players; what we're doing here is just trying to learn what we can with the tools already in place.

Yes, we are. For a number of reasons we're running tests on a weekly cadence right now, so we don't really have time to explore the entire possibility space variable-by-variable. Instead we're jumping between reasonably optimized implementations of various different plausible models of new player behavior, to try and establish as quickly as possible which model gets us in the right ballpark. We have a number of likely-looking mountains that we want to do a rough height-check on; once we've established some baselines for those, we'll be in a position to consider doing hill-climbing to find local maxima.

(...)We're also adjusting the War Point total you need to accumulate in order to graduate from the Academy, down to 400 War Points. This didn't seem like a very large number to most of us here, but our metrics suggest the median new player is scoring about 100 WP per battle, so this has them graduating from the Academy after probably 3-5 battles (with better players graduating sooner and less able ones staying longer, of course). Once graduated, players are free to join any of the normal game modes.(...)

We're also adjusting the War Point total you need to accumulate in order to graduate from the Academy, down to 400 War Points.

Hi there Mercenaries,

So as many of you noticed, we made some adjustments to the Battle Academy (the new player battle queue) in Uprising 1.3 last week. Today, you'll notice in the patchnotes that we're adjusting it again. If you're reading this thread, it's probably because you're interested in knowing why, so let me try and explain

The short version is that we're trying to figure out exactly what works, in terms of giving new players the best experience possible.

In 1.3, we did an experiment to see what effect giving new players the simplest possible game mode would have, by moving the Academy to a 16-player Ambush map. Our provisional conclusion is "new players don't really like super-simple game modes", so today we're switching the Academy queue over to 32-player Domination. This adds more players, and takes the experience closer to the "full-fat" Skirmish mode while still (hopefully!) keeping the game flow easily comprehensible.

We're also adjusting the War Point total you need to accumulate in order to graduate from the Academy, down to 400 War Points. This didn't seem like a very large number to most of us here, but our metrics suggest the median new player is scoring about 100 WP per battle, so this has them graduating from the Academy after probably 3-5 battles (with better players graduating sooner and less able ones staying longer, of course). Once graduated, players are free to join any of the normal game modes.

This is an ongoing experiment, so we're expecting to make further changes in the coming weeks, to try out new theories and home in on the best experience. Happily, we've got a reasonably comprehensive set of metrics tracking retention and so on, so we have a pretty good overview of the trends involved.

If you have any questions, please ask away and I'll try and answer as best I can.

Cheers,
-Greyscale

Yes, we are. For a number of reasons we're running tests on a weekly cadence right now, so we don't really have time to explore the entire possibility space variable-by-variable. Instead we're jumping between reasonably optimized implementations of various different plausible models of new player behavior, to try and establish as quickly as possible which model gets us in the right ballpark. We have a number of likely-looking mountains that we want to do a rough height-check on; once we've established some baselines for those, we'll be in a position to consider doing hill-climbing to find local maxima.

Ok. So are you really adding something constructive to the table? Something that would better the experience of the new player??

Fortitude is a mentality that never gets old.

400 war points is a really bad idea. once they play their 4-5 games you are going to throw them into the proto stomping game and they will leave and never come back. It seems whoever is telling yall what to do is really incompetent. there is no way you can justify this change.

I guess it's safe to say by this point that CCP is not afraid to lose some players in the name of statistical research.

Not many people seem to understand what the Dev. said. From my understanding this is a temporary adjustment purely for the point of seeing how new players behave activity wise. Since the main activity change here is how quickly they will be thrown into the main part of the game, I would guess what CCP is looking at is new player acivity once they are out of the academy not so much while they are in it.

Gathering data on how well low SP new players stick around in the main game to get an idea of what SP levels make a considerable difference in player retention looks like the point of this change. Maybe???

All I know is some newberries are gonna die.

Remember, there never used to be an academy.

Tell me, what is the difference between 500k sp and 520k sp when you get thrown up against 15M SP death squads?

What is the difference between 500k sp and 520k sp when you still forget that L2 is to throw a grenade and instead, pull out a nano hive?

What is the difference between a player that leaves after getting proto stomped with only 500k sp and a player that leaves after getting proto stomped with only 520k sp?

Oh I remember. I made my alt just to see what the academy was all about. Right now it's just a big experiment. New players should be called lab rats.

EDIT or rather call them beta beta testers

We're actually looking into this at the moment

You guys at CCP should really re-mention the fact that you have completely REDESIGNED the matchmaking system for a future update...so that all of us know that getting out of the academy won't be such a bad thing here in the near future.

Cause I think that without that little bit of CRUCIAL information, everyone here is going to think that 400 wp is absolutely ridiculous.

Hi there Mercenaries,

So as many of you noticed, we made some adjustments to the Battle Academy (the new player battle queue) in Uprising 1.3 last week. Today, you'll notice in the patchnotes that we're adjusting it again. If you're reading this thread, it's probably because you're interested in knowing why, so let me try and explain

The short version is that we're trying to figure out exactly what works, in terms of giving new players the best experience possible.

In 1.3, we did an experiment to see what effect giving new players the simplest possible game mode would have, by moving the Academy to a 16-player Ambush map. Our provisional conclusion is "new players don't really like super-simple game modes", so today we're switching the Academy queue over to 32-player Domination. This adds more players, and takes the experience closer to the "full-fat" Skirmish mode while still (hopefully!) keeping the game flow easily comprehensible.

We're also adjusting the War Point total you need to accumulate in order to graduate from the Academy, down to 400 War Points. This didn't seem like a very large number to most of us here, but our metrics suggest the median new player is scoring about 100 WP per battle, so this has them graduating from the Academy after probably 3-5 battles (with better players graduating sooner and less able ones staying longer, of course). Once graduated, players are free to join any of the normal game modes.

This is an ongoing experiment, so we're expecting to make further changes in the coming weeks, to try out new theories and home in on the best experience. Happily, we've got a reasonably comprehensive set of metrics tracking retention and so on, so we have a pretty good overview of the trends involved.

If you have any questions, please ask away and I'll try and answer as best I can.

Cheers,
-Greyscale

Really? 100 wp per match so after FOUR GAMES the new players are ready to be protostomped?
ffs cut all the BS and make stats-based matchmaking. in fact i don't know if there's enough people playing to create balanced
teams. if dust had this upon release you WOULD have the player counts!

people aren't going to stick around, grind for months just to be able to compete. and they will always be further and further behind. so why not create a dust for them, a different dust for everyone. where it's enjoyable regardless of your skill level because you will always be progressing at the same rate as others with similar stats.

did you even think this over?

why did you think this was a good idea?

@Michael

Much has already been said about what can be done to improve the new player experience. That's what we are trying to discuss.

You are the one who is offering nothing to the table other than "let the newbie scour the internet for information. DIS IS NEW EDEN!", information that should be easily available in-game.





You sound like one of those old 70 year olds who are "set in their ways". This is a video game. It can and will cease to exist if player counts keep dropping.

400 wp is a huge step in the wrong direction. There are two things that battle academy need.

1. Respecs
2. Higher War Point cap

You have now joined the ranks of The So F'N Obvious it's Insane club.

Welcome

Greyscale? What the hell are you doing on the Dust forums O_o?

Greyscale? What the hell are you doing on the Dust forums O_o?

Do not agree with this at all and really CCP needs to do the opposite of what they're doing to Academy.

. More time in Academy - At least 50,000 wp or more.
. Double or Triple SP during the Academy experience so they get the Advanced gear sooner.
. Let players play all game modes. So we have Academy Ambush/ Ambush OMS/ Skirmish/ Domination.
. Also a testing area for trying new weapons and vehicles should be available to everyone.

This is an ongoing experiment, so we're expecting to make further changes in the coming weeks, to try out new theories and home in on the best experience. Happily, we've got a reasonably comprehensive set of metrics tracking retention and so on, so we have a pretty good overview of the trends involved.

If you have any questions, please ask away and I'll try and answer as best I can.

Cheers,
-Greyscale

He's 100% on point though. If CCP gets this game where it needs to be, they can bring in some of the New Eden misery into this game. But right now they don't have that luxury. If it means running off 5 or 6 Eve diehards for the future of the game then so be it.

This is a complex skilling structure with a TON of different options and a TON of different pathways to get there.

The 400 WP Battle Academy might be the dumbest thing I've heard yet from these Devs in nearly a year of playing this game. I'm not trying to be mean, but if that is your answer to fixing the new player experience then we are doomed. I was thinking it should be raised to 200,000.

These guys are getting completely OWNED in pub matches.

Make the Battle Academy longer and give some incentive to these new players to join established corps to get the help they need to make this game enjoyable as soon as possible for them. Incentivize corporations to take in new players (and I'm aware this could be exploited).

You have to push these players to join established corporations or they won't stick around. It's that or come out with an in depth tutorial system along with PVE and respecs available to them when they figure out how bad they screwed up back when they first started.

All this experimentation is in service of building a better understanding of how new players actually behave, which we can then lean on in future to build a better overall new player experience. We're very aware of the need to review all aspects of the way we introduce DUST to new players; what we're doing here is just trying to learn what we can with the tools already in place.

I've elaborated extensively on this subject in our internal CPM/CCP forums, but I wanted to put my thoughts here too for the record.

The TL,DR is this:

1.) Domination is one of the most aggressive and competitive modes the game has to offer at the moment. It's also one of the most fun because of the challenge of uprooting the entrenched enemy team off a single objective, and randomly assembled new players are going to have a tough time finding the best way to be useful because of the degree of practical skill required to succeed in Domination. Skirmish, on the other hand, offers much more flexibility in terms of dropsuit type that can be used, it offers more objectives (and less pressure) for new players to run around and take, and more freedom to explore all that the game has to offer. A few really experienced players will have a tougher time locking down the game and mowing down noobs that feel like they're in a meatgrinder.

2.) 5 matches is crazy-short in terms of acclimating a new player before throwing them into the deep end (and yes, public matches are "deep end" until CCP makes FW more attractive for casual competiive play using the best gear and players begin to separate.) The one-two punch of Domination ---->general matches is like blanching a noob in boiling water before crisping him in the deep fryer. Proto-stomping is still a contentious and well-documented issue that many of us have been offering solutions for - and a couple in particular are strong enough that they may replace the need to have an arbitrary Battle Academy in the first place

I strongly suggest that we consider an uncapped SP threshold (4-5 million as a conservative start) where new players can catch up to competitive levels for general matches without feeling like they have to wait a hopeless amount of weeks (risking losing them as a customer). This has the immediate side effect of a short-term PCU boost - and if it successfully acclimates a new player to a point where they're no longer discouraged, it results in a permanent PCU boost.

I also think that FW and PC should be incentivized enough that they become the primary playground for competitive players wearing the best gear, freeing up high sec matches to have their gear quality limited. Team queuing and reward improvements may or may not be enough to start to separate competitive from more casual players, we'll have to see. But once we achieve a strong enough risk reward balance that the best players prefer these matches at all times, we no longer have the issue of "what will my corp do when we're not defending/attacking districts". We'll always have the issue of pro players starting up noob alts, but there's no reason to compound that problem by throwing young players against the full gear spectrum, especially since the game is just as fun with cheap gear, assuming your opponent is wearing the same. Some players have suggested a "militia only" mode, or "no proto" mode, etc - but I'd rather see this gradient played out across the system as a whole, offering distinctly attractive environments for different types of player - rather than stacking a bunch of game variants that only serve to fraction up an already thin PCU.

Really, if you make adjustments along the lines above, you might be able to eliminate the need for an arbitrary academy environment altogether, providing you gently acclimate players into the competitive levels using the conventional game modes offered.

I've elaborated extensively on this subject in our internal CPM/CCP forums, but I wanted to put my thoughts here too for the record.

The TL,DR is this:

1.) Domination is one of the most aggressive and competitive modes the game has to offer at the moment. It's also one of the most fun because of the challenge of uprooting the entrenched enemy team off a single objective, and randomly assembled new players are going to have a tough time finding the best way to be useful because of the degree of practical skill required to succeed in Domination. Skirmish, on the other hand, offers much more flexibility in terms of dropsuit type that can be used, it offers more objectives (and less pressure) for new players to run around and take, and more freedom to explore all that the game has to offer. A few really experienced players will have a tougher time locking down the game and mowing down noobs that feel like they're in a meatgrinder.

2.) 5 matches is crazy-short in terms of acclimating a new player before throwing them into the deep end (and yes, public matches are "deep end" until CCP makes FW more attractive for casual competiive play using the best gear and players begin to separate.) The one-two punch of Domination ---->general matches is like blanching a noob in boiling water before crisping him in the deep fryer. Proto-stomping is still a contentious and well-documented issue that many of us have been offering solutions for - and a couple in particular are strong enough that they may replace the need to have an arbitrary Battle Academy in the first place

I strongly suggest that we consider an uncapped SP threshold (4-5 million as a conservative start) where new players can catch up to competitive levels for general matches without feeling like they have to wait a hopeless amount of weeks (risking losing them as a customer). This has the immediate side effect of a short-term PCU boost - and if it successfully acclimates a new player to a point where they're no longer discouraged, it results in a permanent PCU boost.

I also think that FW and PC should be incentivized enough that they become the primary playground for competitive players wearing the best gear, freeing up high sec matches to have their gear quality limited. Team queuing and reward improvements may or may not be enough to start to separate competitive from more casual players, we'll have to see. But once we achieve a strong enough risk reward balance that the best players prefer these matches at all times, we no longer have the issue of "what will my corp do when we're not defending/attacking districts". We'll always have the issue of pro players starting up noob alts, but there's no reason to compound that problem by throwing young players against the full gear spectrum, especially since the game is just as fun with cheap gear, assuming your opponent is wearing the same. Some players have suggested a "militia only" mode, or "no proto" mode, etc - but I'd rather see this gradient played out across the system as a whole, offering distinctly attractive environments for different types of player - rather than stacking a bunch of game variants that only serve to fraction up an already thin PCU.

Really, if you make adjustments along the lines above, you might be able to eliminate the need for an arbitrary academy environment altogether, providing you gently acclimate players into the competitive levels using the conventional game modes offered.

Only problem with pve is ai is predictable and sometimes very buggy

So THIS is why I've been doing so damn well and encountering less and less prototypes every match.

400 WP is nothing, ...

All this experimentation is in service of building a better understanding of how new players actually behave, which we can then lean on in future to build a better overall new player experience. We're very aware of the need to review all aspects of the way we introduce DUST to new players; what we're doing here is just trying to learn what we can with the tools already in place.

Sounds really betaish btw.

Lol, I played one game on a new character and got the WP after that one game to be knocked out of Academy.


It took me more than about four games to learn the ropes when I started back in April.


Why not just give a new character 10 to 20 matches in Academy then knock them to the regular matches?

Why does it have to be based on anything like WP or SP?


Just give new players a base number of sample/training matches and off they go.


And it was important to get a sampling of all the game modes up front to practice on. Now more new players are filtering into the other game modes with no clue.

UPDATE 15-08-13: At downtime today we'll be increasing the Academy WP cap from 400 to 1500, to see what impact this has on our metrics.

Characters who log in after downtime and have scored between 400 and 1500 War Points in their career to date will find themselves back in the Academy, which they'll leave (again!) when they accumulate 1500 total lifetime WP.

I am a new player. I suspect I'm a little unusual in that I like to read about what a game is about, and I joined because some friends have been playing since beta. Apparently, it was different.

The Academy was not really useful for me as a tool. This is already obviously a FPS, I don't need that mode to find that out.

Give me a (as other players suggested) environment to learn to use vehicles. How about a weapons testing room? A quick session of this-is-what-high-low-equip-weapon slots are? Have your magical voice lady run through a fitting assembly, which then is taken out on the field....and skipping it is optional, but you can come back again to check things.

I liked the academy, I don't enjoy getting pubstomped when I start. But it doesn't really seem to do what I am reading CCP wants it to do.

Your missing the point the battle achadme is a flawed concept as a whole. A offline pve style walkthrough is needed. Stop trying to reinvent the wheel. Every single other game to date has this. Even planetside has the VR room

That requires code deployment, BA is going to be a small part of the whole NPE eventually as it stands right now though they can tweak and tune the BA in preparation for the NPE change ups.

Do you know how long it will be until we get a tutorial?

Your missing the point the battle achadme is a flawed concept as a whole. A offline pve style walkthrough is needed. Stop trying to reinvent the wheel. Every single other game to date has this. Even planetside has the VR room

That requires code deployment, BA is going to be a small part of the whole NPE eventually as it stands right now though they can tweak and tune the BA in preparation for the NPE change ups.

So I had an idea:
.... as they battle for their lives, and occasionally see the inverted flying coffin lunging by overhead...

UPDATE 15-08-13: At downtime today we'll be increasing the Academy WP cap from 400 to 1500, to see what impact this has on our metrics.

Characters who log in after downtime and have scored between 400 and 1500 War Points in their career to date will find themselves back in the Academy, which they'll leave (again!) when they accumulate 1500 total lifetime WP.

UPDATE 22-08-13: At downtime today we'll be increasing the Academy WP cap from 1500 to 2000, again to check out the metrics impact. We'll also be changing from Domination to Skirmish, so that we have solid numbers on all three game modes.

As with last week's change, characters who log in after downtime and have scored between 1500 and 2000 War Points in their career to date will find themselves back in the Academy, which they'll leave (again!) when they accumulate 2000 total lifetime WP.

War points are not at useless at seeing how well a player has developet I would at diffrent metric tbh

it needs to be 150k wp to graduate, if you set it to a higher number of wp new players will be more likly to continue playing after they reach gradation, it will also give them a chance to get familiar with how multiple things work in battle. keeping the graduation wp so low is ruining both the new player experiance and the veteran expriance also, throwing a handfull of guys that can barly get 100 wp a match into battle with people who can easilly score 1000 per battle is not fair for either group. th amount of one-sided pub-stomps has increased massivly since this change. just change it to random modes with a graduation wp of 150k.

150,000 wp to graduate!!!!!

UPDATE 22-08-13: At downtime today we'll be increasing the Academy WP cap from 1500 to 2000, again to check out the metrics impact. We'll also be changing from Domination to Skirmish, so that we have solid numbers on all three game modes.

As with last week's change, characters who log in after downtime and have scored between 1500 and 2000 War Points in their career to date will find themselves back in the Academy, which they'll leave (again!) when they accumulate 2000 total lifetime WP.

---

UPDATE 15-08-13: At downtime today we'll be increasing the Academy WP cap from 400 to 1500, to see what impact this has on our metrics.

Characters who log in after downtime and have scored between 400 and 1500 War Points in their career to date will find themselves back in the Academy, which they'll leave (again!) when they accumulate 1500 total lifetime WP.

---

Hi there Mercenaries,

So as many of you noticed, we made some adjustments to the Battle Academy (the new player battle queue) in Uprising 1.3 last week. Today, you'll notice in the patchnotes that we're adjusting it again. If you're reading this thread, it's probably because you're interested in knowing why, so let me try and explain

The short version is that we're trying to figure out exactly what works, in terms of giving new players the best experience possible.

In 1.3, we did an experiment to see what effect giving new players the simplest possible game mode would have, by moving the Academy to a 16-player Ambush map. Our provisional conclusion is "new players don't really like super-simple game modes", so today we're switching the Academy queue over to 32-player Domination. This adds more players, and takes the experience closer to the "full-fat" Skirmish mode while still (hopefully!) keeping the game flow easily comprehensible.

We're also adjusting the War Point total you need to accumulate in order to graduate from the Academy, down to 400 War Points. This didn't seem like a very large number to most of us here, but our metrics suggest the median new player is scoring about 100 WP per battle, so this has them graduating from the Academy after probably 3-5 battles (with better players graduating sooner and less able ones staying longer, of course). Once graduated, players are free to join any of the normal game modes.

This is an ongoing experiment, so we're expecting to make further changes in the coming weeks, to try out new theories and home in on the best experience. Happily, we've got a reasonably comprehensive set of metrics tracking retention and so on, so we have a pretty good overview of the trends involved.

If you have any questions, please ask away and I'll try and answer as best I can.

Cheers,
-Greyscale

Still needs increasing, a decent player can get that in one match, remember once they are out of the academy they are up against fully armed squads. the difference crushes a load of new players.

yeah what the heck is ur malfunction ccp ur acadamy graduations need to be set way higher than what they currently are, and do you have a sp cap on acadamy battles aswell? my cousin tried to play today for the first time on his character i made him about a month ago (2.1mil sp) and he didnt even have an acdamy option, he has 0 wp on hin name but he was not aloud in the acadamy to learn anything about how this game works and i think thats a ripoff for him, just because he was saving up passive sp before he jumped into dust is no reaon he shouldnt be givin a chance to learn how it works with other new peope, lucky for him i was online to help him out but what about thoose ohers who dont hav family to help them how do you expect them to gain a decent grasp of how things work in this game?? i garentee i was not there to help him he would have quit after his first batle 2.1mil sp or not.

THE ACADAMY GRADUATION NEEDS TO BE SET TO WAR POINTS ONLY AND IT NEEDS TO BE 150,000, IF U WANT TO PUT A SKILL POINT CAP ON ACADAMY BATTLES IT NEEDS TO BE AROUND 6 MIL , BUT I REALLY DOUBT IF SOMEONE HAS 6MIL SP THAT THEY HAVE LESS THAN 150K WP UNLESS THEY WERE AN ALT ACCOUNT OR SOMEONE WHO QUIT THE GAME BECAUSE IT WAS TOO DAMN HARD TO LEARN WHILE GETTING PROTOSTOMPED.

Today's update:

UPDATE 30-08-13: At downtime today we'll be lowering the Academy WP cap from 2000 to 1200, for the usual metrics-impact reasons. We'll also be changing from Skirmish back to Domination.

Because the cap is going down, any player with a WP total above 1200 will find themselves no longer in the Academy after this change.

Today's update:

Either put battle academy back up to over 20k warpoints where it needs to be or stop wasting your time on it and put out a decent dust patch, one that actually has new content, new game modes, NEW THINGS TO DO, instead putting out patches with pretty new interfaces, with nothing new to do.

You need to stand back and try to see the pattern in testing and reasony why they are being methodically changed. These are not random or pre planned tweaks. They're trying to Identify specific values that will help retain a new player who will likely never post of the forum if they quit.

You need to stand back and try to see the pattern in testing and reasony why they are being methodically changed. These are not random or pre planned tweaks. They're trying to Identify specific values that will help retain a new player who will likely never post of the forum if they quit.

You need to stand back and try to see the pattern in testing and reasony why they are being methodically changed. These are not random or pre planned tweaks. They're trying to Identify specific values that will help retain a new player who will likely never post of the forum if they quit.

oh how to destroy the game... it all makes sense...

Leaving it as is was doing too much damage actually... Let's just say extremely few number of folks ever got to experience a proto stomp.

Leaving it as is was doing too much damage actually... Let's just say extremely few number of folks ever got to experience a proto stomp.

150,000 wp to graduate


quit bullshltin and set the bar higher so it actually feels like an acomplishment to graduate.

what is the acedemy? you get 5,000 wp a match on regular dust....

Ummmm, either you are a beastly logi or you are confusing wp with something else, on average I get about 2000 wp a match, the a stage player seems to get around 1500 on average, noobs seem to get ~500 on average

All this experimentation is in service of building a better understanding of how new players actually behave, which we can then lean on in future to build a better overall new player experience. We're very aware of the need to review all aspects of the way we introduce DUST to new players; what we're doing here is just trying to learn what we can with the tools already in place.

Has there been any thought to a 2-tiered battle academy? First tier is for people logging in for the first time and is analogous to what we have now. The second tier (post-graduate battle academy) is a "kiddy pool" option that would a gamemode type available to players under 2 mill SP (roughly--actual values could be tweaked), in addition to the existing standard modes. I think having people with 1,900,000 in the same match with people launching DUST for the first time trying to figure out how the controls work would be a disaster (which is why the battle academy should push people through rather quickly). Having a safe haven, to take someone from just graduating the academy to playing with the sharks and a reasonable enough SP pool to get some kills should help with new player retention. The 2nd tier academy shouldn't restrict players to only that gamemode though. You should be able to participate everywhere after graduating the first academy. Also, having the Armory test-range is critical for NPE, so they can experiment with weapons to pick a direction they will enjoy.

Once a player has 2,000,000+ SP, they should be able to compete reasonably enough.